This chapter of The Anxiety of Influence uses John Milton’s Paradise Lost as a framework for examining the modern poet’s relationship with the ancestral, but dead, poet — the relationship between Satan and God.
Modern poetry begins in two declarations of Satan: “We know no time when we were not as now” and “To be weak is miserable, doing or suffering.” (20)
Poets feel an anxiety to be original, yet the outside influence of others, especially great poets, is inevitable. Bloom calls this the Covering Cherub, a reference to the Bible, particularly in Genesis and Ezekiel. This anxiety exists because the powerful influence those who are weaker. The anxiety of influence is self-conscious and follows the Romantic obsession with the Genius and the Sublime (see On Simple and Sentimental Poetry).
He defines Poetic Influence in terms of William Blake’s States and Individuals, saying,
Individuals passed through States of Being, and remained Individuals, but States were always in process, always shifting. And only States were culpable, Individuals never. Poetic Influence is a passing of Individuals or Particulars through States. (29)
He invokes the imagery of the Sphinx and the Covering Cherub; the Sphinx is sexual anxiety, but the Cherub is creative anxiety. The Sphinx is nature, whereas the Covering Cherub merely obscures vision, a power display from God (the ancestral poet). This Cherub causes an anxiety that blocks creativeness, which reminds me of reverse psychology; when one is intentionally trying to remove something from the mind, they inevitably think about it more. It is a never-ending spiral — an abyss. The poet easily pushes the Sphinx aside, but has difficulty seeing past the Cherub.
Lucretius uses clinamen to refer to the slight swerving of atoms that cause collisions. This swerving is also the source of our free will. Now, it’s used to describe an inclination or bias. This “change from destiny to slight caprice” then “divides each poet from his Poetic Father” by both deliberately and unconsciously misinterpreting the ancestral poet’s work in an act of creative revisionism — Satan’s rebellion against God. What does not change is the “stationing context”, or the essence, experience, and emotion of poetry, the poet’s Spiritual Form (is this the same as Plato’s Forms?) (42).
As such, clinamen frees the poet from Poetic Influence. Each poem the poet reads influences and passes him through a new State of Being, and his act of creative revisionism is what sets him free in the abyss.
highlights
The poem is within him, yet he experiences the shame and splendor of being found by poems—great poems—outside him. – p. 26
Discontinuity is freedom – p. 39
It might seem strange that opinions of weight are found in the works of poets rather than philosophers. The reason is that poets wrote through enthusiasm and imagination; there are in us seeds of knowledge, as of fire in a flint; philosophers extract them by way of reason, but poets strike them out by imagination, and then they shine more bright. – p. 40